Category Archives: FM14 – Network game

While undeniably a season of progress, the 2017/18 will be remembered for two standout matches and a rather welcome farewell to my ramshackle old stadium and cabbage patch pitch.

You’ve heard me whine on before about the state of our playing surface and the rather baffling decision of my board to move us to a new stadium, twice the size of the old one, which we struggled to fill one tenth of so I’ll focus your attention towards the action on the pitch rather than that off it.

I’ll start with the bad (the good will come, while the ugly obviously refers to managerial rival Shrew Naldo).

The bad was so bad, so very, very bad. So bad, in fact, that I don’t want to put it on the front page of this fair site. You’ll have to read on, therefore, to explore the full baddy badness of our trip to Calais.

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First of all, apologies for the incredibly tardy nature of this article. As any of you who follow me on Twitter will know, I haven’t exactly been enamoured with the game of late and I haven’t really had the motivation to write much about it – even though I am still, more or less, enjoying the network game with Petr.

Unfortunately, I haven’t had much enjoyment on the pitch as, for the first time in my long, long history of playing CM/FM, I have been relegated.

Relegated.

Into the league below the one we were in previously. It’s a confusing concept and I don’t like it.

First up I would like to apologise for the utterly heinous title to this piece. It appears our editorial policy has veered into the wall of the pun and I’ve had to fall in line, which is why you’ve recently read titles such as “Basque to Basics” and “Basque to the Big Time”. It’s been wall-ful.

What wasn’t so wall-ful, however, was our fourth season in National. Long-suffering readers of this column will be fully aware of my ineptitude when it comes to Fooball Management and of our on-off love affair with relegation.

This season, however, we mainly stayed away from the league’s bottom and focussed our activities on its lovely mid-section. How did we improve from the potentially catastrophic to the merely mediocre?

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Season three was, shall we say, an interesting one in the Pyrenees. Full of frustration, terror, resignation, rejuvenation and then realisation, it was a year when the full challenges of managing LAP became clear to me.

I’ve mentioned the club’s crippling financial issues before, however, thanks to some tight wage control and the sale of some players we actually turned a tiny profit for the first time in the game. The French government then recognised this achievement by taxing most of it off us. Thanks!

Having survived a relegation battle and an emergency board meeting the previous season I vowed never to go through those traumas again. 2015-16 decided otherwise, however, and I experienced the same once more, but this time the spectre of failure haunting me was junked up on steroids and carrying a bazooka.

… or else I’m sure that there would be all sorts of suspicions about the honesty with which I am playing the game.

We’ve all read the stories of those who update on their saves and have miraculous success with their clubs. “I can’t believe it, we won 19 promotions on the trot and I won the FA Cup with non-league Village Green Rovers. Isn’t it amazing?!” Well, no. We all know what you’ve been doing.

A sad by-product so many obvious cheaters is that when I read a story of great success I’m immediately suspicious. Thank god, therefore, that Petr Uchio can attest that this season has come about fair and square. As difficult to believe as that may seem…

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A good few months have passed in the south west of France since I last posted, with much happening and not much of it nice. The 2014/15 season was very much one to forget if you’re a LAP fan but one to savour if you like horror stories.

First up, before I cover that season of terror and pant-wetting, you’ll be interested to hear that we did manage to haul ourselves into the 2013/14 promotion race. After wins against Vendee Lucon and Ajaccio we had moved to within four points of our rivals and with them facing off against each other we faced strugglers Strasbourg, Dunkerque and Pont Du Gard.

For some reason we simply didn’t turn up, picking up just the point from those three games (although being a gentleman I couldn’t let Shrew lose his league status on my account) and missing out on promotion by six points.

A season of what could have been finished with a feeling of frustration but confidence that with the right recruits we were well-placed to build on our improvement from the second-half of the season.

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When Petr and I last updated on our network save, we were 10 games from the end of season 1 with my Dunkerque side on an inexorable slide towards the relegation zone. We were coming up to a critical period of the season when we’d face 3 of the bottom 4, games which would offer us our best chance of gethering the points to guarantee safety.

We’ve come some way since then with the holiday period affording us more time to play than would usually be available. There’s been a fair few late nights / early mornings, reminding me of my university days… except I never used to get woken up by a 2 year-old at 6am.

Ahead of Petr’s own update (which will be along shortly), here’s my view of how things have gone recently.

I watch every minute of every Austrian Bundesliga game. This blog contains posts from the top players of the week, to top youngsters to watch. Follow me on twitter for more: @FRfussballtim. For all enquiries email: tim.jones@footballradar.com. All views expressed on this blog are my own.